this game is so fucking stupid. its made for me
like its a basic ass third person shooter but the selling point is you can make your own silly mechs, right? that's cool, yeah? whats armored core 6
the core (haha) of the game, ie boosting around shooting mechs that have gone rogue for some reason i forgot because the story is delivered in japanese only with the worlds slowest displaying subtitles, is fine. making a mech that has one giant arm holding a massive rocket launcher is great if you're a capital g gamer like i aren't. its just so, so, SO rough
its from D3publisher (and developed by? maybe???) and thats right, you might have suspected, it means it suffers hugely from jank japanese console port disease, in that there are only 3 screen resolutions to choose from (none of which are my monitors res), weird, bone hurting inducing mouse acceleration, and menus that are NOT set up for mouse and keyboard whatsoever. like. camera controls in the hangar or photo mode are either WASD, OKLM, or arrows, and it is never clear which one it is! it's like a surprise every time
and it shows playstation button prompts in menus. but only sometimes
it also doesn't explain SHIT about gameplay lol. sometimes enemies drop purple crates which you can't pick up, but it turns out they're consumable powerups! and then there are the red crates and yellow cans that drop, which i cannot fathom what they're for. there's no indication anywhere i've found for the purpose of these mysterious objects. you pick them up and some glowing cubes fizz around your mech and it goes bleedlebeep.
however after missions end it does show an inscrutable screen full of mech parts and stuff which might be upgrades to your gear, probably, but its bizarre how that info is presented. like pages from an unsorted excel spreadsheet full of shit like "Gabrax Arm R 4-M | 4UP" and "Girl Head L | 1UP " with a red bar that is filled in some amount, for some reason. i don't know what the bar is for
much like EDF is its a game i can only recommend if you're a pervert sicko like i am who enjoys this sort of jank shit. like building a stupid mech is fun, after you figure it out - which it also doesn't really explain. you get a lot of expo in japanese with subtitles about critical parts and a hint what stats they impact when you first try to edit a mech, but it also does not explain what the stats actually do, unlike something like armored core and its help system that explains just what all the numbers actually mean. here you assume that bigger number is better and fuck you actually! figure it out yourself
like i kind of feel like comparing it to AC6 is hugely unfair since one is the latest entry in a cult classic series that fans have been waiting 300 years for, and the other is the type of game you'd see in a dump bin in gamestation you'd only look at when you had some left over trade-in credit to spend. its a budget game, basically. its wild, i know, you don't get those anymore! until today. and it costs £40
it is categorically not worth £40, and definitely not the price i paid for the ULTIMATE EDITION which also provides a baffling array of pictures of anime women to plaster onto your diabolical creations, or you can build the giant mechs from EDF4.1 and 5 too and mount one onto a truck. also in a very funny way, you can make tiny versions of them too if you want, and charge around as a very small Gigantic Unloader Barga with shotguns mounted to every possible hardpoint. which i do, actually. i just didn't have enough ingame funds to do that yet
"but moot," you ask, "why did you buy the ULTIMATE EDITION when you knew, in your heart, that it would be jank from the start?"
because i am fucking sick in the head. thats why
7/10
